Children of Tamriel End of Summer 2017 update

Hello everyone! It's been a while since I posted an update regarding my ongoing Children of Tamriel (Children of Morrowind add-on for TR) update. I believe my last post regarding the project was nearly a year ago. I wanted to share status of the project.

Currently, the project is experiencing delays and there is no current functional mod. After the release of the new data structure, I found the mod would no longer open in my editor or game due to irreconciliable incompatibilities between the new data and my mod. I will admit that I was so frustrated by this that I gave up for a few months. Also, my computer at the time died unexpectedly and the loaner I was using was an old junker that did not run Morrowind well.

This past spring, my friend who is the database administrator for Elder Scrolls Online (at Zenimax, parent company of Bethesda) received a bunch of the company's retired computers when they were clearing out old equipment and refurbed them for himself and a bunch of his friends, myself included. These are of course from a video game production company so their old obsolete equipment is more powerful than many current computers. I realized when I got it that I could probably run the Morrowind Graphics Extender with an insane number of cells, amongst other cool experiences. I promptly set it up as a gaming computer with three screens, light up keyboard, and gaming mouse and quickly thereafter realized I don't really have much time for games.

After I got the computer, I decided to resume work on CoT. Since the old mod was no longer usable and I lost all my work, I realized I would have to start the project over using the new data. I have also been slowed down by health issues, stress at work, and other hobbies. More importantly however, I decided to change my project strategy. Previously, I was planning and implementing simultaneously. I am the kind of person who likes to see results, which is part of why I was doing things backwards and adding characters before really having a plan for future expansion as TR develops. One of the major issues with creating a mod for a larger mod with ongoing development is that it basically involves an ever-changing target. Since TR is never complete, by definition neither will be CoT. Now that the data system has been integrated with development of other projects and has been transitioned successfully for a long time, I feel I can safely begin work on implementing the project again.

For the next several weeks I will be formulating a project plan. I will dig up the old threads about the project and take note of what I want to add again, though I have no way of recreating the original set of characters. I will have to repopulate each town from scratch. I will probably create a list of characters to make for each town before actually making them instead of randomly making them as I go. I did previously do some demographic research for each town before implementing that town but the actual creation process was mostly random. Also, I will probably make a CoT download available each time I do a town. I am also working on a project plan that will enable me to stay compatible as TR develops.

Progress will be slow, since I am only one person with other obligations and may only have time for one or two CoT sessions a month. However, I feel it is important to work on this project as time allows. Recently, TR has been setting up more complete integration with Vvardenfell, and I feel I have a responsibility to honor that integration by creating CoT for Children of Morrowind users who also use TR. It makes no sense to me for the towns in Vvardenfell to be populated with children but not on the Mainland as such a discrepancy does not work from a story perspective without some ludicrous handwave. Working on this project will allow me to make my own small contribution to the goal of integration between the original game and the amazing expansions which is TR.

Cheers, good to hear from you again and about your PC too! Less so about health and stress, but it sounds like things are working out.

Sorry about your mod troubles, but running the filepatcher that shipped with Tamriel_Data over your ESP should have cleared up the problems and redirected it to the new structures. It was used to patch Tamriel Rebuilt itself and my own mods - it can't deal with things if you edited/deleted existing assets and the CS will just spawn them again when TR_, but then again, every update to TR_Mainland is an issue if you've done that (and it's not bad enough to break mods).

Planning things out in advance is good though, I subscribe to that school for big projects. I'm looking forward to what you can make - although I don't use CoM myself (or CoT for that matter), I've liked the idea of the mod and your work on it. I hope you'll succeed on it.

The patcher didn't help and I no longer have the original files. All I have to work with are my previous posts here. Keep in mind that this mod has two big mods it pulls from, may have something to do with why I couldn't get it working after the data change.

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